Ornativa is an online jewellery store, carving jewellery for the free spirited woman, who loves to reflect her individuality through fashion.

The Gems and Jewellery sector is witnessing changes in consumer preferences due to adoption of western lifestyle. Consumers are demanding new designs and varieties in jewellery, and brands competent to fulfil the changing demands are more likely to sustain, in a massive gems and jewellery market. The industry, which is on an up-scale with a constant 5-6% growth factor, is likely to outreach USD 257 Billion gross worth, by the end of 2017. With a vision to create masterpieces, Suptotthita Neogi along with Nabarun Chakrabortty started fashion jewellery brand Ornativa in an awe to provide customisable jewellery to their customers. Retailer Media had a dialogue with Nabarun Chakrabortty to know more about the start-up.

How was Ornativa conceptualised? Share with us the journey so far? Being a woman, Suptotthita, Co-founder, can understand the pain of finding the right kind of jewellery for everyday wear, which is of good quality and comes at an affordable price. I, being a jewellery designer with more than 8 years of experience in working with some big brands, was thinking to start something of my own. Suptotthita and me discussed the idea of creating premium quality, customisable fashion jewellery at affordable price and started Ornativa.

Who is your target consumer? Could you please share how have you detailed your consumers? Our target consumers are women aged 20-35. We spoke to a lot of women and girls and did market survey to identify our customer segment and their pain points.

Elaborate your concept of celebrating charm of the free spirited women? How have your latest designs justified this concept? The young women of today leads a completely different lifestyle than their previous generations, they are strong and independent. In terms of fashion also, they want the reflection of their individuality. To match this, we strive to create unique designs every time without compromising the quality. We launch 3 new collections every month. Very soon we are going to launch customised fashion jewellery, where our customers can create their own jewellery according to their own style and choice in real time.

Share with us the joy of winning the ShopClues’ Next Big e-Preneur Challenge. It is one of our biggest achievements till now. When we gave the news to our friends, family and team member, everyone was even happier than us and flooded us with best wishes. We had a big party to celebrate this achievement.

On what grounds, do you finalise your jewellery designers? What is the turnaround time of customisation of jewellery patterns? They should be passionate about their work as much as we are. They should be well aware of the latest industry trends and global fashion trends. The turnaround time depends on the jewel type, size, etc. On average it takes 5-10 days.

As a lot of e-Commerce firms are running in losses, how much revenue are you expecting by the end of this year? We are generating average monthly revenue of Rs.10 lakhs by bootstrapping our self. In addition, we make profit on every order we receive. We are expecting to generate revenue of Rs. 4 cr. by end of this year.

How much investment are you garnering and where do you plan to invest the raised amount? We are seeking an investment of Rs. 1 Crore for a runway of 12 months. We will be utilising 40% of the investment to increase our brand awareness and marketing activities, 30% to strengthen our operations and supply chain, and the remaining 30% on enhancing our technology.

Trends like imitation jewellery, jewellery on rent etc is in huge demand. Are you planning expansion around these? No. We want to focus in premium quality fashion jewellery and would like to scale into this industry. Right now, we don't have any plan like this.

What has been your A-ha Moment in the business? (The high point) Being the winner of Shopclues Next big e-Preneur and getting featured in BW Disrupt, as one of the ‘Top 10 jewellery start-ups in India’ were definitely our biggest A-ha moments till now. Also being a part of two accelerators, ISDI accelerator powered by Microsoft ventures and Spark10 accelerator, is also our turning points.

What has been your biggest challenge so far in scaling-up? How are you addressing it? We started as a inventory based model, but that model required a huge investment, so we moved to lean inventory model and started using 3D printing technology by which we were able to reduce the time and cost of manufacturing as well. And also, very few jewellery manufacturers in India are using the latest technology for manufacturing. So, we are manufacturing our jewellery from Bangkok too.

How do you see the growth scenario in this business? What are your future scale-up plans? In India the fashion jewellery industry is huge. About $ 2.5 Billion worth of jewellery was bought last year and this is expected to increase by 23.6% this year. This is a highly untapped market and the opportunities to grow and scale in this space is enormous. Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) report suggests that jewellery is amongst one of the top 10 categories in eCommerce that received the highest number of clicks. We aim to achieve 10,000 monthly orders by the end of August 2017.We are also exploring the opportunity to expand in the US and European market.